Sudan Conflict: Adopting Israel's Alleged Genocide Blueprint by RSF
In an appalling episode of brutality, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) descended upon the Zamzam displacement camp in Sudan's North Darfur on April 11. The RSF, in a horrific display of violence, set ablaze huts and shops, executed medics, and indiscriminately fired upon fleeing civilians.
According to observers, the death toll exceeded 500, with men, women, children, and the elderly among the victims. Hundreds of thousands more were forced to flee, their homes reduced to ashes.
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The attack on Zamzam sparked worldwide outrage, prompting the RSF to propagate propaganda they had been peddling for months - that Zamzam was, in fact, a military barracks.
"Zamzam was a military zone ... so the RSF decided that we should evacuate civilians," RSF advisor Ali Musabel told Al Jazeera, offering no tangible evidence for his claim. "We didn't want civilians to get caught in the crossfire."
This tactic, strikingly reminiscent of Israel's strategy in the Gaza Strip, was denounced by Sudanese human rights lawyer Rifaat Makawi.
"This is not a coincidence: it is a deliberate practice aimed at stripping civilians of their legal protection by labeling them as combatants or instruments of war," Makawi told Al Jazeera.
A Blueprint for Genocide
Throughout Sudan's civil war, the RSF has employed human rights jargon and terms from international humanitarian law (IHL) to perpetrate atrocities. Since launching its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, Israeli forces have been progressively more brazen in their use of this strategy.
Israel claims hospitals in Gaza are Hamas "command and control centers," attempting to justify its attacks on healthcare facilities, which are protected by IHL. It also asserts that Hamas hides among civilians to use them as "human shields," justifying disproportionate and intentional attacks against those very civilians.
In addition, Israel brands its mass expulsions of civilians as "humanitarian evacuations," giving people mere hours to pack up their entire lives and flee from the path of Israeli bombs, if they can.
Israel is accused of genocide by various rights groups and UN experts, with at least 52,567 Palestinians killed during the conflict. The RSF, according to local monitors and legal experts, is adopting this approach increasingly.
"The fact that the claims made by the RSF in Sudan mimic the claims Israel is making in Gaza ... reveals the emergence of a template to commit mass extermination and even genocide," said Luigi Daniele, a senior lecturer on IHL at Nottingham Law School.
The UN accuses both sides in Sudan's war of committing grave crimes, including killing, torturing prisoners of war, since the power struggle between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces erupted into an all-out civil war in April 2023. Human rights groups accuse the RSF of perpetrating additional atrocities, including a potential genocide against the "non-Arab" communities in Darfur.
From Janjaweed to Human Rights Language
The RSF originated from the nomadic "Arab" militias in Darfur, known as the Janjaweed (devils on horseback in Sudanese Arabic) for the countless atrocities they committed. The army used the Janjaweed to suppress a rebellion by sedentary farming "non-Arab" communities, which started in 2003. The sedentary communities were protesting against their political and economic marginalization in Sudan.
The SAF and RSF were closely allied until at least 2021, when they came together to overthrow the civilian administration they had been sharing power with, following a popular uprising that toppled autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
Shortly after the coup, the RSF signed a memorandum of understanding with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to receive human rights training. Now, the RSF and its political allies use human rights terminology to try to sanitize their atrocities.
For instance, on March 8, an RSF-backed political alliance, Tasis (Foundation), tweeted: "We stand in solidarity with Sudanese women in their recent ordeal, where they have faced particularly tragic conditions and been subjected to horrific violations as a result of the unjust war." Tasis made no mention of the reports published by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which accuse the RSF of widespread sexual violence and rape throughout the war.
During the raid on Zamzam, the RSF reportedly abducted 25 women and girls and raped others, according to the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, a local monitor documenting sexual violence in the region.
"What I see today in Darfur, and specifically in Zamzam, is not merely a violation of the IHL, but evidence of its distortion and transformation into a cover under which the gravest crimes are committed," human rights lawyer Makawi told Al Jazeera.
Finishing the Genocide?
The Zamzam camp was established in 2003, 15km (9.3 miles) from North Darfur's capital, El Fasher, to shelter "non-Arab" Zaghawa and Fur communities, who had fled Popular Defence Forces' violence during the first Darfur war. Both communities suffered genocidal levels of violence and were expelled from their lands by the state-backed Janjaweed. Zamzam soon became a symbol of the atrocities they endured.
By April 2024, the RSF had besieged El Fasher and surrounding towns after the Joint Forces - a coalition of "non-Arab" armed groups formed to fight the government in the past - shifted allegiances to the army. Given the RSF's longstanding enmity towards "non-Arab" ethnic groups, the Joint Forces feared widespread ethnic killings if the RSF captured the entire state.
The RSF blocked aid to anyone not aligned with them, leading to famine in Zamzam. As civiliansstarved from hunger, the RSF began claiming that Zamzam was a "military base," revealing their intention to attack.
"This claim that there was a military base in Zamzam was never correct ... we had some people who acted as a police force, but there were no military leaders in the camp," said Mosab, a middle-aged man who survived the massacre in Zamzam and now languishes in the nearby town of Tawila.
Musabel, the RSF advisor, told Al Jazeera that the high civilian death toll was due to the Joint Forces using "human shields," without providing evidence.
Ethnic Cleansing
The RSF has also replicated Israel's tactic of carrying out mass expulsions under a humanitarian pretext. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has pushed 2.3 million Palestinians into smaller and smaller pockets of land, which it describes as "safe zones" in Gaza. Israel bombs or invades these areas, claiming they "became military targets" due to the ostensible presence of someone from Hamas there.
"What Israel has done in Gaza, in reality, has been issuing mass expulsion orders under threats of extermination, which is a declaration of intent to commit international crimes," Nottingham Law School's Daniele said.
On April 11, Tasis posted on Facebook, calling for civilians to flee Zamzam through what it termed "humanitarian corridors" leading to nearby towns such as Tawila and Korma. Yet, on April 27, an RSF commander was seen announcing the detention of a group of unarmed men who had fled Zamzam through a supposed humanitarian corridor to Tawila, in a video verified by Al Jazeera's authentication unit, Sanad.
He said the men had sided against their Darfuri brethren and with the traditional elite, represented in the "Arab" Jalaba tribes who live in central and northern Sudan and comprise much of Sudan's military and political elite. He added that they might kill the detained men to serve as an example to others.
The detainees were relief workers, according to local monitors, who fear they may have been killed. Al Jazeera was unable to confirm their fate.
Survivors told Al Jazeera that the RSF had carried out ethnic cleansing, possibly committing several war crimes.
"Some of us were executed by the RSF along the road out of Zamzam and others were violently displaced," said Mohamed Idriss*, who walked for 13 hours before arriving in El Fasher.
"We were exposed to so many violations, the RSF committed massacres and ethnic cleansing," he told Al Jazeera.
- The attack on Zamzam displacement camp in Sudan's North Darfur, carried out by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has been met with widespread outrage worldwide.
- The RSF's claims that Zamzam was a military zone aimed at protecting civilians from crossfire have been denounced as a ploy reminiscent of Israel's strategy in the Gaza Strip.
- Israeli forces, in their genocidal war on Gaza, have been progressively more brazen in their use of human rights jargon to perpetrate atrocities, such as labeling hospitals as Hamas "command and control centers."
- Sudanese human rights lawyer Rifaat Makawi contends that the RSF's tactic of labeling civilians as combatants or instruments of war strips them of their legal protection, revealing a deliberate practice aimed at committing mass extermination and even genocide.
- The RSF originated from the nomadic "Arab" militias in Darfur, known as the Janjaweed, who committed countless atrocities against sedentary farming "non-Arab" communities in the region.
- In response to the crisis in Zamzam, the RSF has carried out ethnic cleansing, possibly committing several war crimes, as survivors have reported massacres, executions, and violent displacement.
